What is frame scaling?

[bajkapeter]

Hello,

I was fiddling with the settings in GTA 5 on my PC, and I've come across this setting called "Frame Scaling"

What does it do, exactly?



Since I'm using a single 290X (soon I'll be upgrading to an ASUS Strix GTX1070), I've found that the resolution set to 3840x2160 is fairly playable with the highest settings, only with the frame scaling of 0.667

What resolution does the game use now?
It looks way better than 1440p because of the scaling, and it looks a bit sharper too

 

[Bakua]

Frame scaling ups the resolution of the game and then downscales it to your monitors resolution.

 

[bajkapeter]

And what resolution would "3840x2160*0.667" be in normal circumstances?

I know that 4K with 0.5 scaling equals 1080p, but this "mysterious" resolution looks far more sharper and better than 1440p (without frame scaling, on a 4K display)





EDIT: just crunched the numbers, it is exactly 1440p, but for some reason, 4K scaled to 1440p looks way better than 1440p itself without scaling (without scaling, everything looks more blurry and jagged)

 

[Solandri]

EDIT: just crunched the numbers, it is exactly 1440p, but for some reason, 4K scaled to 1440p looks way better than 1440p itself without scaling (without scaling, everything looks more blurry and jagged)

If you send a 1440p signal to a 4k monitor, the monitor will use its internal scaling algorithms to map it to the 4k pixels.

If you use a scaling option in the game, the game will use its own algorithms to rescale the image from 14r0p to 4k.

There are a gazillion rescaling algorithms. In your case, it would seem the one built into the game is a lot better than the one built into your monitor. Unfortunately this is not uncommon - monitors don't exactly have a CPU at their disposal, so a lot of manufacturers cheap out and use a simple scaling algorithm instead of paying a few cents extra to include a decent hardware scaler.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_scaling

 

[bajkapeter]

You're definitely right, I do have a fairly cheap monitor (Samsung U28D590D) which is less precise with scaling than gaming-oriented displays


I'm afraid I'll have to upgrade my GPU sooner or later, to be able to play in 4K